Support of the Branded Food Products Database for Public Health

Investigators

Abstract

Support of the Branded Food Products Database for Public Health-The mission of the Risk Factor Monitoring and Methods Branch (RFMMB) within the National Cancer Institute?s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences includes monitoring dietary intakes and providing data to assist in formulating public policies related to diet. This work is conducted, in part, by the support of data infrastructure to enable such analyses. The Branch has identified the subject of compositional data on the multitude of branded foods in the nation?s food supply as a gap in this infrastructure, particularly data on food group composition. They are particularly interested in supporting the provision of freely available public use data to researchers. Branded food data are available through commercial databases, but these are costly, and none contain variables for food pattern equivalents that translate mixed foods into food groups of nutritional interest. The US Department of Agriculture has been the major provider of freely available, public use data on the composition of foods, but the number of foods in their National Nutrient Database has been limited to a relatively small set of less than 10,000 foods to represent the many hundreds of thousands of foods available in the marketplace. Nonetheless, this database has consistently been recognized as having extremely high standards of quality. The USDA has joined forces with the ATIP Foundation and the International Life Science Institute (ILSI) North America to form a public private partnership (PPP) through which they can augment their nutrient databases with compositional data on branded food products. This will be accomplished by obtaining comprehensive food composition data from food manufacturers and making it available to all interested users through an enhanced National Nutrient Database.